25 April 2015

“Truly, while most artists hitherto have taken from nature something
wild and strange which, besides making them abstract and fanciful, often
brought out in their work the shadow and darkness of vice rather than the
clarity and splendor of those virtues which make men immoral, in Raphael on the
contrary there shone forth all the rarestvirtues of the soul accompanied by such grace, proficiency, beauty,
modesty and fine manners as would have amply concealed any vice, however gross,
and any blemish, however enormous.”

- Giorgio Vasari, fromLives of the Most Eminent Painters,
Sculptors, and Architects (1568)

I. When the Shaffer Art Galleries reopened at
the beginning of this year after eight months of renovation, it came as a
revelation and not onlybecause the
gallery had more than doubled in size.Founded in 1870 as a Methodist college, Syracuse University began
collecting art four years later, and today the collectionnumbers more than 45,000 objects, most of
which have not been on public view in decades, if ever.

Dominating the European gallery is a large tondo, a round painting, in
a carved, gilded frame that weighs 250 pounds. In back of the frame, the painting itself is a 47 inch square wooden panel. That
this painting compelsyour attention
even in the company of Durer, Rembrandt, and Lucas Cranach the Elder, suggests an artist of the highest order. The gallery card
identifies it as a Madonnaattributed to ‘Raphael,
school of, c1500.”Research on the
painting is ongoing but what is clear to the appreciative eye is its supremely gentle beauty.

Within the circle a young woman holds a little boy with her left hand
while with her right hand she gently draws back a blanket from the face of an
infant. An image of sweetness and light that is universally understood.In this instance she is the Virgin Mary and
the children are the infant Jesus and a pudgy future St. John the Baptist,Christian imagery re-imagined fora 15th century Renaissance
audience.The characters are set against a
landscape that historians have dubbed the 'sacro-idyllic', a style dating back
to the early years of the Roman Empire.This was the stuff of countless murals that decorated the walls of upper
class Roman villas, the cultivated agricultural landscape that Virgil
envisioned in The Georgics (c.37
BCE),a vision of symmetry
and artifice where trees stand alone like antique columns.

II. How important was the artist known as Raphael?Until modern artists elbowed their way onto
the stage, no art was held in higher esteem than that of the Italian
Renaissance and no artist was more revered than Raphael.To own a Raphael was to reach the pinnacle of
collecting for a Gilded Age titan, just as owning a Van Goghwould be for a collector today.

“(T)he onlyartist whose
prestige had endured all changes of taste and fashion up to the end of the
nineteenth century.”- David Alan
Brown,curator of the exhibition Raphael
and America.Art historian Bernard
Berenson called Raphael the “most famous and most beloved name in modern art”
and this about an artist who had been dead for more than three hundred
years!

Creators sometimes view things differently than collectors do.Renoir enigmatically described the Raphael's
influence as something he had to get out of his system.Baudelaire, the splenetic, predictably did no
think much of the sunny Italian.In
spite of their name, the group known as the Pre-Raphaelites, although
fascinated, complained thatRaphael's
work had squashed their spontaneity.

That there was no Raphael in any 19th century American art
collection was a source of national embarrassment.The expatriate Bernard Berenson wasinventing a new profession – art attribution
-and thereby creating a marketfor ‘Old Master’ art.Thanks to Berenson, prices were rising as
the race to acquire a Raphael was in progress.In his role as adviser to wealthy collectors, Berenson recommended to
Isabella Stewart Gardner that she pass on Raphael’s Colonna Madonna in 1897. But Berenson's opinion was not
disinterested; in his worlda painting
he did not get the chance to authenticate barely existed.For him, the Colonna madonna was not merely
relegated to the categoryof 'school of'
pictures created in Raphael's workshop but “pictures Raphael barely looked
at.”Now in the collection of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Colonna Madonna, more primitive and less
elegant than the Shafer Madonna is credited to Raphael himself.

Her contemporariesoften
compared Mrs. Gardner to the great Renaissance art patron Isabella d’Este, was
planning to turn her Boston home into a museum and she badly wanted a
Raphael.She would better have purchased
a Raphael Madonna than the portrait that she did buy of a fat, ugly Roman
churchman.Not satisfied, Gardner wrote
to Berenson, “My remaining pennies must go to the greatestRaphael…”and not the “tiresome dreary Colonna Madonna.”

But that is exactly the picture that New York financier J.P.Morgan
decided to buy on a whim when saw it in a Parisian gallery in 1901.Whether Morgan knew that Vasari had described
it as “truly marvelous and devout” or that both the Louvre and the British
National Gallery had passed on it, he wasted no timei n snapping it up at first
sight.Morgan was not a man to haggle
when he wanted something, a habit that caused concern to his business colleagues.Clinton Dawkins, for one,worried that Morgan might just buy the entire
National Gallery.And in June 1902
Dawkins wrote “We never see him and it is difficult to get hold of him.He spends his time lunching with Kings or
Kaisers or buying Raphaels.”

III. Raffaello Sanzio or Raphael was born at Urbino in 1483.It has been claimed that he was born on April
6, the same day that he died in 1520 at the age of thirty-seven; whether that
is correct or he was born on the alternative date of March 28 depends, in part,
on your taste for artifice.A small
town, Urbino was no rural backwater, advantageously located halfway between
Florence and Rome. Thanks to the enlightened patronage of the duke,Federico di Montefeltro who employed the
boy's father as a court painter, Urbino during Raphael's time was a center of
culture where all the splendid painters of the day were known. Piera della
Francesca worked there for precisely that reason.One of the Venetian artist Titian’s best
known paintings is his Venus of Urbino (1538),
commissioned by the Duke.

It is from Vasari, his contemporary, that we learn about the artist’s early years.Left fatherless at the age of eleven, Raphael took over his father’s
workshop and soon surpassed his father’s achievements. Word spread of his precociousness and Raphael
was invited to apprentice at Perugia in the workshop of Pietro Vannunci, affectionately
known as Perugino.In him, Raphael found
a master whose graceful style harmonized
with his own inclinations.If the young
Raphael did not have his hand in this painting, it certainly inspired his Madonna of the Meadow (1505). Vasari also took the measure of Raphael s' achievement accurately
and generously, seeing in him an artist less intellectual than
Leonardo da Vinci and less revolutionary than Michelangelo, yet an artist
without peer in the handling of paint.

Was this painting from the workshop of Raphael or was it painted by him? Art attribution is now a profession on which millions of dollars hang in the balance, a situation that can bring out the worst in some people, as anyone who has watched the arrogant performance of Thomas Hoving in the documentary film Who the *$&% is Jackson Pollock? knows. The Shaffer Madonna, regardless of who painted it, transcends such worldly concerns.

For further reading: Raphael and America by
David Alan Brown, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art: 1983

Images:
1.Raphael, school of - Madonna and child with the young St. John the Baptist, c.1500, Shaffer Art Gallery, Syracuse University.
2. Shaffer Art Gallery # 21 - photograph courtesy of Syracuse University.

06 April 2015

Kierkegaard said that we live life forward but understand it backward; that's also a good description of how we respond to works of art, although it is not how we are expected to write about art, if we do.

Recently I saw Crescent (above) for the first time. Although I knew nothing about the artist and not much about eastern Asian art, the painting made me think of the Dutch artist Jan Toorop and how his Indonesian childhood influenced his art.

Jan Toorop (1858-1928) was born at Purworejo in central Java
where his father was a clerk for the Dutch colonial government that ruled the
Indonesian archipelago during the 19th century.His mother was half Chinese. The Toorops were
descended from Belanda Hitam or Black Dutchmen, soldiers recruited
from the Gold Coast of Africa (now Ghana), also a Dutch colony.It would be anachronistic to call either the
Toorop family or Indonesian art ‘multi-cultural’ but contemporary art historians are scrambling
to understand the multiple sources of existing artworks or else ignoring them
in the hope that they can continue their claustrophobic and deeply exclusionary
dialogue undisturbed.

The Toorop family returned to the Netherlands so Jan
could study art but the young Toorop
found the avant-garde artists of Les Vingts in Brussels more
congenial than the academic painters at the Amsterdam Academy. During the
period when he lived in Brussels (1882-1886), Toorop became friends with the
prickly Belgian from Ostend, James Ensor, and the two traveled to Paris together to check out the latest developments in French art.In
1886 Jan Toorop married Annie Josephine Halla woman from Sligo, Ireland. Their daughter Charley Toorop was
born in 1891; the subject of numerous paintings by her father, Charley Toorop
grew up to be an artist herself.

For Toorop, European culture became an addition; his work already
had a story to tell that had been inspired by the art he had been exposed to as
a child in Indonesia. Like Vincent Van Gogh, Toorop became a socialist
sympathizer after observing the people at work in the slag heaps of the Borinage,
a horrific landscape more vivid than any hell imagined by the Symbolists.He read their poetry in books by Maurice Maeterlinck and Emil Verhaeren, like
the rest of his generation.These names
loomed large in international circles; Maeterlinck would win the Nobel
Literature Prize in 1911 and contemporaries would not have been surprised if the
prolific Verhaeren had done the same.

We could view the sirens in Toorop's Shipwreck as an example of Art Nouveau, and a bold example at that, but Toorop's visual vocabulary had its roots in wayang kulit, the Javanese art of puppet theater. It is one of the oldest known forms of performance art in the world. Wayang held a place of high honor at the royal cours and at rural festivals alike. Wayang beber, a variation, substituted a painted scroll for the puppets; against this background a narrator told a story to the musical accompaniment of a gamelan orchestra. Kulit puppets were flat characters, mounted on bamboo sticks, their faces chiseled in great detail in rhythmic patterns by hand. Their attraction for Toorop, an artist of outstanding draftsmanship, seems obvious. The amassed interlocking human forms that Toorop often employed for his prints have their ancestors on the scrolls and, like their predecessors, what may appear at first as chaos is quickly resolved into a harmonious group by the use of strong lines.

The connection between Jan Toorop and Crescent, at least in my imagination, is there also in another Javanese art - batik. Of ancient origins, batik making reached its zenith in Indonesia where, not incidentally, the 19th century Dutch immigrants became involved in its production. The techniques used for transferring designs to cloth are similar to those used in lithography, seen here in Toorop's work. To make a design in batik, wax is applied to areas of the cloth, color is applied to the whole cloth, and then the wax is scraped off, revealing the completed pattern. In,lithography, chemicals are applied to to discrete portions of the stone stone or wood block; sometimes incisions are made directly into the surface. Again, a multi-step process allows layers of colors and lines to be built up sequentially by the artist. Those who dismiss these arts as minor in comparison to painting with oils ought to give it a try. And yes, the dominant colors used in batik are indigo blue and warm brown.

Total Pageviews

Why The Blue Lantern ?

A blue-shaded lamp served as the starboard light for writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette's imaginary journeys after she became too frail to leave her bedroom at the Palais Royale. Her invitation, extended to all, was "Regarde!" Look, see, wonder, accept, live.

"I think of myself as being in a line of work that goes back about twenty-five thousand years. My job has been finding the cave and holding the torch. Somebody has to be around to hold the flaming branch, and make sure there are enough pigments." - Calvin Tompkins